In this article and in Part 2 I advance a ‘critical historiography’ of IPE which
excavates to the deepest foundations of the discipline. For while I very much
welcome Benjamin Cohen’s seminal historiographical intervention, nevertheless
it obscures two foundational properties of IPE. First, identifying 1970
as the birth-year of IPE produces a distorted image of the discipline’s purpose
and historiography that can begin to be remedied by rehabilitating
the originary era of classical political economy. Second, focussing on issues
revolving around methodology and epistemology obscures the deeper Eurocentric
metanarratival foundations upon which the vast majority of IPE
scholarship between 1760–2012 stands. Specifically, I reveal the various Eurocentric
metanarratives that underpin the orthodox traditions of classical
political economy (Smith and List) and modern IPE (Gilpin and Keohane).
My conclusion is that rather than producing positivist/objective (or even
critical) explanations of the world economy, most of IPE has, often unwittingly,
defended, promoted or celebratedWestern civilization as the highest
or ideal referent in the world. I follow this up in Part 2 by deconstructing
open economy politics to bring my historiography upto the present while
advancing an alternative non-Eurocentric empirical and theoretical research
agenda for what I call inter-civilizational political economy.